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I personally use OpenOffice as my default desktop office suite compared to others like the bulky and bug-ridden Microsoft Office or the online processors like Zoho and Google Office (I like Online office suites, but they are severely limited). However, OpenOffice is an excellent office tool, but the start-up is truly a turtle crawl! Follow these steps that I used and ensure that you get to start in a breeze with OpenOffice:

These are the steps to make OpenOffice launch faster either in XP or Linux. Just remember that these steps are also RAM intensive.

The OpenOffice.org Word Processor is launched. Go to the Tools menu and select Options. The Options window is opened.

Highlight Memory on the left panel, change the setting as shown below.

Reduce the number of Undo steps to a figure lower than 100. I use 20 steps.

Under Graphics cache, set Use for OpenOffice.org to 128 MB (up from the 6MB).

Set Memory per object to 20MB (up from .5MB).

Set the number of objects under Cache for inserted objects at 20.

At your own risk, you can enable or disable the quickstarter for OO. I prefer to disable it myself. To permit it, check OpenOffice.org Quickstarter.

Java is a performance hog. You can disable it entirely but if you use plug-ins which rely on java, it is discouraged. Now highlight Java on the left panel, uncheck Use a Java runtime environment

Restart OpenOffice and voila! Chop off more than 10 seconds off the loading time.

For final notes and to prevent OO from stealing precious performance from the OS itself, uncheck OpenOffice start-up in MS-config. To do this, hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc and click File then hit Run. In the Run dialog box type msconfig and look for the open-office entry. Uncheck it, hit OK – restart PC and you’re good to go.

Optional – Disable the OpenOffice Start-up Screen:

In Ubuntu Linux: Go edit the “sofficerc”-file via gedit, type sudo gedit /etc/openoffice/sofficerc . Next, you have to change the variable Logo to 0 which will show:

[Bootstrap]
Logo=0

In Windows, Go to your default OpenOffice directory, usually C:\Programmer\OpenOffice.org 2.1\ and go further directly to C:\Programmer\OpenOffice.org 2.1\program\ and locate soffice.ini. Open it with your text editor like Notepad and fine the word Logo=1. Change the value from 1 to 0. which will show Logo=0. There’s an alternative way of doing this through the command line. Type using the command line – “C:\Programmer\OpenOffice.org 2.1\program\swriter.exe” -nologo

That should perk OpenOffice up and let you do your homework without the hiccups :) .

Well My Diploma project under Oo3.0 Ubuntu opened up in about 3-4s to but with these tweaks it’s now One..Tw..Done :) ( not a full 2s ).
And the scrolling and big drawing groups aren’t that slow anymore.
Also you might wanna try SoftMaker’s TextMaker’s trial. It’s good enough especially if you switch the theme from Linux to Vista the graphics become acceptable; well except for the strange menu fonts. Good .doc import & export features and it’s got the default microsoft fonts installed by default.
Thanx for the guide.